Visual Studio Remote Debugging

I had some problems today getting Visual Studio to connect to the Remote Debugging tool (MSVSMON.exe) running on an ASP.NET application server. The error message I received when I clicked on “Debug” –> “Attach to Process…” was along the lines of:

The Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor (MSVSMON.EXE) does not appear to be running on the remote computer.

…even though I definitely was running MSVSMON on the server via an RDP session. There were no firewalls enabled on either machine, or sitting on the network between us.

In order to resolve this I shared my locally installed version of MSVSMON over the network so that it could be accessed by the server in question and ran the tool directly from the share. Once I had done this I had no problems connecting. Typically MSVSMON can be found in the “<Visual Studio Install Directory>\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger” folder in both x64 and x86 flavours.